Creatures & Names: Speaking for Animals

Because I recently did my Swiss friend Daniel the honor of writing a story about him in German for my German class, he decided to do me the honor of introducing me to two stuffed animals that he and Monika made. I hereby introduce you -- with a little help from Daniel -- to "Das Tier" and "Max."

As adorable as they are, though, I think the e-mail introduction that came with them is even better. My favorite sentence is in bold. According to Daniel:

since you sent me your great story about our trip to Salzburg (or in Englisch the Salt-castle) I send you two of our dolls. The first one is called "das Tier" (the animal) and has no other name. It is happy with the name (which is not a name) but it is not aware what a name is. But that doesn't matter. We do not know what kind of animal it is therefore we are also quite satisfied with its name. The animal is made by Monika. The other one is, as you might see, a mouse and the mouse is called Max. I created Max when I was sick and not able to do anything else but Max says that sounds like he was an accident. That's why I say that I created Max during my phase of high inspiration and that he is the best thing that I ever produced. But Max was not happy that he should be a thing, and he is certainly right, he's not. He is the finest creature on earth!

Because we care deeply at predicate, ink. about the relationship between creatures and language, I couldn't resist sharing these fabulous guys and their fabulous little text. (He's totally predicate, ink. guest blogger material, right?) Perhaps there is something particularly (culturally) Swiss about this concern: Hans Arp -- an artist who plays a major role in my dissertation, and who spent most of his life living and working in Switzerland -- seems to have been fairly obsessed with the relationship between "things" or "creatures" and their names or classifications.

Much of his work, as I see it, is made in an attempt to understand how it is that an artist can create an object that can pass as a creature or, in his words, "organism." And naming is a big part of this. Arp once wrote about himself (in third person) that he "wanted immediate and direct production, like a stone breaking away from a cliff, a bud bursting, an animal reproducing…he wanted animalesque objects…he wanted a new body among us which would suffice unto itself…" And in works like his 7 Arpaden (1923) series, he gives these creaturely forms proper names, like "Mustache Hat" (Schnurrhut) or "The Navel Bottle" (Die Nabelflasche). The series explores the way that images and names work together, even need each other, in order to create a "creature."

predicate, ink. has always explored the work that a caption can do to a drawing. And drawings of animals seem particularly vulnerable to the work of the caption. What I began to realize as I made the drawings is how frequently we use language in order to use animals. I say this more philosophically than veganistically: We attribute qualities to animals by way of subject-predicate phrases ("Guinea pigs are blobs." "Boobies are birds.") And furthermore, we attribute intention to them ("Salamanders like cupcakes.") In our most blatant act of mascot-poaching, we've even asserted that the male seahorse's unusual parenting behaviors have something to do with that animal's political convictions. What I've always found pretty fascinating is that my drawings and my captions are usually made of the same "stuff" - squiggly black line. And yet somehow one always holds so much sway over the other.

From medieval bestiaries to Eric Carle to LOLcats, moralizing or anthropomorphizing those behaviors of animals that science holds to be instinctive -- but which, for humans, are matters of choice -- has held unmistakable appeal. (As this company's CFO has been known to say, "What's so hilarious about LOLcats is that it reveals cats to be the sleazy, slimy creatures, conspiring against us, we always suspected them to be." Tell me that is not a profound statement.)

Some would say this is because humans have some kind of hubristic impulse to speak on behalf of speechless animals, in order to pad their sense of species-dominance or something, etc. etc. (Indeed, I know at least one friend and predicate, ink. reader who once expressed his strong feelings on this subject to me in the course of a long debate over Mexican dinner.) Forget the plow or the spear, language is a major technology by which we are able to harness the animal (and the artwork) for human use, for better or for worse. This use of animals might be self-serving (as my friend argued), but is it really so unethical? Feminist and postcolonialist scholars have worried, mostly in the 90s, about "speaking for others" (see Spivak and Alcoff), but there does seem to be a major material difference when the thing couldn't possibly speak for itself.

Indeed, there is a kind of "speaking for others" done by the animist imagination that is also the place where the arts of puppeteering and animation begin. It is also a huge part of 'twee' culture today. (Just take a peek around etsy and you'll encounter tons of shops that treat their objects like creatures with full-fledged personalities being put up for adoption, much in the spirit of Daniel's little e-mail.)

I suppose it's the apparent passivity of certain (grammatical) subjects -- animals and art objects alike -- that make them particularly amenable to the predicate statement. Which is also what's so apt about now putting these drawings onto babies: drawings that speak for the doubly speechless (not just animals, but cartoon ones), to be worn by the speechless (and illiterate) baby.

There's an interview I heard on NPR a few years ago with Robert Smigel that touched on this quite brilliantly. Smigel is the creator of Triumph the Insult Dog, the scat-obsessed Rottweiler puppet made famous on Conan O'Brian who now appears alongside similarly depraved "Anipals" on Smigel's show TV Funhouse. I've actually never seen the show, but Smigel's answer when Terry Gross asks him about his interest in mixing real animals with puppet animals on his show is pretty hilarious and has stuck with me. It speaks to that unbridgeable distance, or irresolvable incongruity, between human and animal consciousness -- not so much as a philosophical quandary or ethical question but as an infinitely tappable source for comedy. He says:

I love the idea that you can manipulate live animals into a really funny bit and they have no idea why it's funny, why they're there. That just adds a layer of joy to the whole experience to me. And you know we make it very clear and we make a real point of not making the animals actually do anything. Like, in the cockfight [scene], for example, there's a bunch of animals in the audience. But if you look in the background, a lot of them are asleep even though we have cheering noises. A lot of them are just lying down, have no interest in what's going on. And, like, on the one hand there's, like, a practical joke element to it that we're playing on the live animals -- that we're making them appear to be doing things. But on the other hand... I also enjoy the joke the animals are having on the show by expressing no interest in what's going on, even though we're presumably trying to make them appear to be extras. They're above it, they have better things to think about than pretending to enjoy a cockfight.

I guess there's something slightly perverse about Smigel's quote (as there is about his humor in general), but I like the way it takes to be an open question who actually has the upper hand in this situation. Obliviousness is what makes the animal subject to our exploitations of it for comedy; but it is also what makes that human activity so irrelevant to it.

It's this same absurdity that Daniels' sentence highlights so wonderfully: It is happy with the name (which is not a name) but it is not aware what a name is.